Tesla Semi Revealed – Range Of Up To 500 Miles, Available 2019

In the build-up to the reveal, very little (if any) concrete information was known, so we were left wondering such things as:

What will its electric range be?

How much will it cost?

When will it be available?

What’s the payback period?

Well, now that it’s been revealed, we can begin to answer some of those questions. We’ll start with range

Tesla Semi

Range

The Semi is said to have a range of 500 miles operating at GVW and highway speeds, which is generally further than a diesel-powered rig can go on a single tank. That’s aided by efficient aerodynamic designs for the rig, including a flat bottom and side flaps to all but close off the gap between truck and trailer. All combined, Tesla says its Semi has a drag coefficient better than that of the Bugatti Chiron. Musk says Megachargers will add 400 miles of range in just 30 minutes.

Tesla Semi

Availability

Tesla says the Semi will enter production in 2019 and is already taking reservations at $5,000 per truck. If this goes forward as-advertised, we aren’t shy about saying this machine could be a bonafide game changer in the automotive world – trucking or otherwise.

Tesla Semi

Payback & Price

As far as price, Tesla makes no mention of total cost but does claim owners can realize a $200,000 savings in fuel over the course of a million miles. That sounds like a ton of driving to mere mortals, but racking up that kind of mileage is par for the course in the trucking world.

Prior to the reveal of the semi, Bloomberg released an interesting post on this very topic. It’s rather in depth, with interviews, math calculations and so forth, but the real highlight is this simple graphic showing possible prices and payback periods. We do suggest you read the entire article for the necessary background though, but the gist is that payback is what fleet operators look at most, so the figures need to make sense from a financial standpoint.

The Tesla Semi will go zero-to-60 mph in five seconds. With 80,000 pounds in tow, it can still do it in a mere 20 seconds. How about 65 mph uphill? Typical semis are lucky to pull off an uphill at over 45 mph. If Tesla pulls this off, it’s now clear why Musk is so excited.

The question is whether or not the Nikola semi tractor will never enter production. The biggest attraction for a BEV semi tractor is the savings in using electricity over diesel. But the Nikola One uses hydrogen fuel, which as nearly all EV fans know, is much more expensive on a per-mile basis than diesel.

I don’t see any realistic market for the Nikola One. Even a niche market would require a subsidized price for hydrogen fuel, and that subsidy paid for by the government or some third party… not by either Nikola or a trucking company.

There may be some places in Japan and Europe where the government will (foolishly) subsidize the price of H2 fuel sold to the public, so I suppose Nikola might find a niche market there.

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What Cummins demonstrated was not a Class 8 semi tractor capable of hauling 80,000 lbs. Its prototype/concept semi tractor was a smaller one, for lighter loads. That’s not a competitor for Tesla’s Semi Truck. Certainly Cummins has the ability to put that into production before Tesla does, but will they? It depends on whether or not they think there will be a market for it.

Looking at the failure of Smith Electric Vehicles, I’d say that’s rather iffy. But the continually falling price of batteries means that at some point, shipping and trucking firms will start to buy BEV trucks, at least for local shipping and delivery routes.

Altho I created what InsideEVs writer Domenick Yoney called a “Napkin Math 1.0” analysis of the practicality (or lack thereof) of a BEV semi tractor, I certainly don’t have any special insight into the economics of running a freight truck, either short-haul or long-haul. Cummins will certainly have access to information on that, and they’ll be in a much better position than I am to judge when the time is right to enter the market.

* * * * *

And keep in mind that just because Tesla says it’s going to start production on a BEV Semi Truck in 2019, that doesn’t mean they actually will do so that year!

That’s the billion-dollar question: How many, if any, trucking fleet operators will “bite” at Tesla’s offer? If not many do, we can rest assured Tesla won’t put the truck into production, despite all Elon’s entertaining, tongue-in-cheek hype. (Nice to see that he’s not taking this too seriously. Too bad the same can’t be said of the Tesla hating FUDsters!)

Tesla (or Elon) says it’s aiming at fleet sales. No doubt Tesla would sell a Semi Truck to any independent trucker who wanted to buy one, but my understanding is it’s going to be a lot harder to make the economic case work for a small trucking company or individual owner-operator.

As I understand it, the deal here is a higher up-front cost for the BEV Semi Truck in exchange for lower running cost. That higher up-front cost is going to be a lot easier for a large trucking company to bear than a small one.

And yes, getting Megachargers installed where the company needs them will be an issue, one likely easier to deal with for a company with deep pockets.

It seems that everything you confidently predicted yesterday that was shown to be completely wrong today has not humbled you in the slightest. It would be short range. The gap shown in the animation was “ridiculous”. As always you explained how you couldn’t really know, but you’d be very surprised if you weren’t right, since after all your logic was impermeable…

Maybe today isn’t the best day to keep showing nonsense with confidence. Just being able to sound sure of yourself doesn’t mean you have a clue!

Dare I add that while I made no specific predictions, my observations on the economics of having enough battery capacity for long range have been vindicated..? Yeah, I think I do.

And yes, the lack of gap between cab and trailer, and shown in the short animation, was and is ridiculous. If Tesla can actually do that in real life, then let them demonstrate it — which, apparently, you failed to notice they didn’t! Looks like that’s a “work in progress” which they can’t yet demonstrate.

And you’re flat out lying when you claim I asserted the Tesla Semi Truck would be “short range”. I said it looked more likely to be medium range, but I always left open the possibility that Tesla would figure out something that I couldn’t see. And as it happens, I wasn’t exactly wrong, either — this isn’t a long-range, 800+ mile truck that would “beat diesel” for range. Elon fudged on that by claiming that diesel trucks have a range less than 500 miles, when the truth is that there is no standardized size for diesel semi tractor fuel tanks. Some of them can and do use tanks that give them more than 800 miles of range.

Now, Terawatt, your mommy is calling. Come back when you grow up enough to engage in adult discussion, because from your whining and spiteful post here, clearly you aren’t.

The polish truck driver I saw in Italy would certainly want a better acceleration.
He drove by another truck on the runway leading to the highway.
Would have been a much more smooth overtake in a Tesla truck.

When overtaking, trucks in Europe are not limited by power, they are limited by their compulsory “black boxes” that are non stop recording all driving data including speed excess (speed limit for trucks in Europe is between 80 to 100 km/h depending on country).

Of course their acceleration is limited by power, just as all machines are limited by available power.

I’d think, Euro-FUDster, that you’d be so embarrassed by your recent claim that you could build a production EV around an elevator motor (!) that you’d stay out of any further discussion of EV technology. 🙄

“And for any actual truckers out there… how many of you actually care what the 0-60 time is for your truck? Payload attached or not?”

Obviously you have never driven a heavy truck. But even so, I’d think it would be obvious to anyone who’s ever been behind a tractor-trailer rig when they pull away from a stop light, or behind one driving up a steep hill, that acceleration and power are rather limited in such trucks. I’m sure everyone who drives a truck for a living would appreciate having more power available on demand!

Full disclosure: I’ve never driven a semi truck, but I have driven a large farm truck loaded with grain, and when I was a kid I rode with an uncle who was a “big rig” trucker, once or twice. (At the risk of bragging, my ability to drive a double-clutch truck once came in handy when a friend of mine rented a moving van which required… oh, you guessed. 🙂 )

Not to mention the noise! Love hearing those air brakes in the morning, NOT! Regen should be virtually silent. Ah, the serenity 🙂
I don’t think people really will appreciate the lack of noise once EV’s dominate. Trucks make a LOT of noise we just take for granted at the moment.

We all know your main reason for coming here is to indulge in your hobby of online forum warfare with the Tesla sect members. If this is the best you can come up with, the Semi must be incredibly good..!

Acceleration without a load isn’t much of an issue with modern trucks, even though more would be better. But the glacial slowness with a fully loaded truck is of course something any truck driver wants to eliminate. Partly to avoid annoying everyone else on the road, partly to save time, but mainly to be able to enter roads safely without having a mile gap in traffic!

But at the end of the day trucking is business and purchase decisions are more rational and more cost-based than for cars. And that’s why electric trucks are going to happen.

I think Tesla were rather thin on the charging infrastructure. Only speed was actually stated (in miles in half an hour, but that’s fine). No word about the number of chargers or where they will be. No concrete price guarantee on the electricity (using the word “guarantee” doesn’t count since what is guaranteed was not explained). No timeline for the charging network.

Even so, with this much range and 80% of roundtrips being possible to complete without needing to charge means I believe this is enough. The operator will have confidence he won’t be stranded with a truck that can’t be used because the infrastructure fails to materialize, and he will probably want to charge at base for these 80% of trips anyway, since it means he is buying the electricity himself, needs lower power, and gets a very good rate.

The Roadster is unimportant, but what a cool technology demo..! As for the pick-up, it’s a monster and I have a hard time taking it seriously.

It’s very true; our first view of these on public roads will most likely be them going from the gigafactory in Sparks NV to Fremont CA…Then we’ll most likely see a Tesla truck with a car carrier carrying Tesla vehicles to delivery centers…

Not until Tesla has a railroad spur line built to Gigafactory One, they don’t! Building that that was part of the original plan for the Gigafactory (now called Gigafactory One), but Tesla hasn’t done that yet, and I don’t know why.

There is not as much shorting of Tesla stock going on as people think. Most of the losses are from insider sales and institutional sales. Those are both more worrisome than somebody speculating on Tesla stock to go down. People who own Tesla options and financial institutions who are analyzing Tesla’s performance in a more data driven way are heading for the exits. Those stocks are being bought over in the dips by “retail” investors, the kind of yeehaw on internet boards who gets caught up in buying frenzies and hype. That usually means that there is some kind of trouble over the horiZon that people aren’t quite factoring in.

“There is not as much shorting of Tesla stock going on as people think.”

Reality check: Tesla stock (TSLA) is often the most shorted stock, of any. In fact, I read just the other day that currently it’s again the #1 shorted stock.

What is amusing is that the level of “short interest” is so high that the shorts are actually driving up the stock price, contrary to the usual situation with short sellers providing a brake on soaring stock prices.

Sometimes evil really is its own reward!
😀 😀 😀

(I define hoping for, and betting on, Tesla to fail, as evil… YMMV.)

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“People who own Tesla options and financial institutions who are analyzing Tesla’s performance in a more data driven way are heading for the exits.”

Oh, now I see… you’re just another TSLA stock shorter who foolishly thinks he can drive down the TSLA stock price by posting FUD here.

Doesn’t work for anybody else, Mr. Loser, and it’s not gonna work for you either!

True. It met a lot of resistance at $300 and now is squeezing back up. You can also get a clue when the big boys, Chanos, Einhorn, and others start crawling out of the woodwork, touting their short positions, that things are not going well, or as expected, for their positions.

It’s true some of the shorts have made money, but only when Tesla popped up way high. So you had to have good timing. Still a lot of interest because it’s a volatile stock and fundamentally is overpriced.

I’m sure that some short-sellers have made money shorting TSLA, yes. It would be ridiculous to claim nobody has.

What I don’t understand is people who stay in a short position long-term; people like “tftf” and Mark B. Spiegel (aka “Logical Thought”)… and, presumably, most or all of those posting Tesla hater FUD here on a daily basis month after month and year after year.

With a stock as volatile as TSLA, that is guaranteed to lose money in the long term.

“financial institutions who are analyzing Tesla’s performance in a more data driven way are heading for the exits”

Not really, even if a fund manager has the solid opinion that Tsla will likely head downward as from 2018, he partly buys stocks that are in fashion as it is required by his non specialist customers. Cult stocks by definition are in fashion. That is the reason those stocks can crash extremely brutally leaving no time to retail investors to react.

Institutional holdings are actually reported in 13F SEC reports and can easily be tracked. By far the vast majority of institutional investors are holding for long term profit. And of those who are buying and selling, more are buying than selling.

Here are the hard cold facts per the most recent 13F reports:

85,023,024 shares are held by institutional investors in anticipation of long term profits.

6,581,307 shares were purchased by institutional investors.

5,119,067 shares were sold by institutional investors. More likely to take profits on their investments than to get out of TSLA.

The net results are that institutional investors are INCREASING their holdings, not running for the doors.

So the numbers prove you a lying scumbag, trying to hump your alternate reality bullpucky.

The numbers you pulled down should allow you to calculate what % of those shares are institutional and yet, you didn’t. You forget that total shares outstanding is variable. The latest insitutional ownership based on the numbers that you yourself posted is 57.5%. What was it in Q1, 2017? I’ll save you a google. It was 67%. You don’t see 10% of a stock rolling out from institutional investors towards retail investors as a big change? What does that tell you?

If I’m a lying scumbag, what kind of filthy, rotten animal does that make you?

Megachargers will need an industrial power hookup. It will be up to trucking companies to decide where to install those. I don’t see Tesla getting into the business of operating a Megacharger network open to the public, as the Supercharger network is.

I think the business arrangement for Megachargers will be like Tesla Destination Chargers, with Tesla installing the charger but the property owner actually owning the equipment, providing power, and being responsible for maintenance.

Yes and also a huge battery bank backup to avoid huge peak demand charges. There is no way Tesla will be able to provide electricity for 7 cents/kWh with demand charges but on the other hand a huge battery bank will also cost a fortune so clearly Tesla intends to sell electricity at a loss.

Or maybe Tesla intends to install Megachargers only where there will be no demand charges, such as on a property which has an industrial power hookup? Or maybe Tesla will tell fleet operators they are responsible for demand charges?

I think it’s waaaaaaay too early to come to any conclusions. (One of my predictions, that fleet operators would be paying for the power for these Megachargers, has already been shown to be wrong.)

As they say, The devil is in the details, and we don’t yet know the details.

Most people don’t have any particular problem with that, Bill. I realize, though, that for someone who has a rather tenuous connection with reality, someone such as a die-hard conspiracy theorist like you, this is a serious daily challenge.

They WILL be building Megachargers on interstate routes, and they WILL be charging 7 cents. They are accomplishing this with Solar panels and battery backup that they build themselves at Gigafactory1 and Gigafactory2. They can lock the price in because they will be locking in most of their costs to generate electricity ahead of time (because that’s how solar works).

They will also be selling Megachargers to fleet operators to install on their sites. They could then choose to install solar and battery backup too, and lock in their own fuel costs if they want to.

I seriously doubt that Tesla will be providing a significant amount of energy to the Megachargers with solar power. Tesla claimed back when Superchargers were new that they would be solar powered. In reality, not so much, and one doesn’t have to be a genius to see that Megachargers are even less likely to be powered by solar panels, since the power requirement will be much higher.

By my “napkin math” calculations, a single Supercharger would need a solar farm the size of 1-2 football fields in size, if solar power was to provide all the energy on a continuous basis. (That is, not using a large battery pack as a buffer.) A single Megacharger obviously would need far more!

If they are serious about selling these things, they will have to open a Megacharger network along main interstate routes, just like they did Superchargers, though perhaps not on as many secondary interstates.

No other private company would spend that money to build it out in advance of there being a large pool of trucks already on the road.

Of course for regional use the truck can charge at the destination, potentially while unloading and maybe reloading.

Yes, especially for no place for a second driver to “ride shotgun”. But actually that makes sense, because after 500 miles (or more realistically, probably a bit less) the truck will have to be hooked up to a Megacharger for 30-60 minutes, or a lower-powered charger for a longer period.

No need for a second driver if the maximum distance run is only 500 miles or a bit less!

People who charge at the mega chargers. This is the guaranteed ceiling rate at mega chargers. Elon covers this in the presentation. Tesla is hoping to beat that rate. Wholesale solar is already much cheaper.

True and also the driving pattern may be very different with this truck. Since it have to recharge (and I don’t believe a word about that 400 miles in 30 min BS) it will likely have lower yearly mileage changing the calculation.

In the real world, unlike the Bizarro world of Planet FUDster, it’s a pretty straightforward bit of math: If the battery pack is good for 500 miles, then an 80% charge would be good for 400 miles, and Tesla certainly has shown with its Superchargers that an 80% charge in 30 minutes is possible, altho that’s optimum.

All the Megacharger needs is higher power from the grid, which certainly is no engineering challenge.

I am often dismayed at the lack of knowledge about high voltage systems in discussions of EV tech.

High voltage power delivery is an engineering challenge that was solved more than a century ago, and is in quiet everyday use in industrial installations all over the world. There’s nothing particularly hard about it, and safety concerns have long since been dealt with.

Oh, and Proterra already has BEV bus chargers working at 500 kW. Those are installed and in use, not just a “prototype”.

When every other manufacturer had done squat, but Tesla has rolled out a world wide super charger network and vehicles with real world range and performance, I think I have more faith in Tesla being able to achieve this than other auto manufacturers being able to achieve their claims.

Take for instance the $5bil/yr profit company like Nissan, is the 2018 Leaf the best they can do? Or what about the 2nd largest car manufacturer in the world, VW, is the e-Golf and so far non existent ID the best they can do?

Elon has a mission and he is executing it in a way that should have people excited and rivals scared s***less. What was his comment about the Roadster? Essentially kicking the ICE in the balls? I think that sums up what Tesla are doing very nicely.

“The Bloomberg chart is useless, as there’s no way this semi will come in at $215,000.”

Oh, I think it might well come in at a substantially lower price than that. Keep in mind that Tesla is talking about renting the battery pack, not selling it. A typical price for a relatively high-end new diesel semi tractor is $150,000, and I can easily believe the Tesla Semi Truck will come in at less than that, since it won’t have the expense of an ICE powertrain.

For 500 miles at highway speeds WITH a payload, I’m thinking 500 kWh, or 1 mile/kWh. So 400 miles in 30 minutes would be some insane 800 kW charge rates. Even if the battery turns out to be a bit smaller, that’s still double the 350 kW charge rates Porsche is quoting for their Mission E. Sounds like science fiction for the time being.

The chart above shows that it has a 600 kwh battery, assuming that is right, that would be say 480 kw in 30 min, or about 1 MWH.

This sounds high, but remember that is still less than 2C charge rate. My hunch is this will be a higher voltage pack. If you get the voltage at 1000 V or higher you can use a lot less charging current. My hunch is this will not be the same connector that a car uses, or it will use multiple chargers.

“Can anyone make a calculated guess regarding to what the battery pack capacity is in kWh?”

Before this Reveal, estimates were ~0.5 kWh per mile, and based on that, 500 miles would need a 1000 kWh battery pack.

But if Tesla really is using sliding panels to close off the gap between cab and trailer, they might be achieving even lower drag (and therefore better energy efficiency) than we were estimating. So, just as a ballpark guess, guessing that gives them another 10% range, maybe 900 kWh for 500 miles?

Keep in mind, though, that the 500 miles is likely to be rather optimistic. Remember that Tesla advertised the Model S85 as a “300 mile car”, and continued to do so even after the EPA rated it at 265 miles. If the “500 miles” is similarly inflated, that would indicate the real-world average range would be ~442 miles, indicating a ~884 kWh battery pack, or ~800 kWh if the sliding panel thing gives them another 10% energy efficiency.

Also, I’m skeptical that the “sliding panels to close off the gap between cab and trailer” is actually going to work on a long-term basis for a working truck. I’d like to see that given a long-term test by a real trucking company to see if it’s practical. So far as I can tell from reports about the Reveal, they didn’t show the sliding panels working, nor even a video showing how they work. Perhaps that’s just a “work in progress” and they only hope they can get it to work on a practical basis.

The payback period will be a little longer for a tesla truck if diesel prices drop because of increased supply and less demand…but just imagine no more dirty toxic particles coming out of trucks on our roads and highways HALLELUJAH praise the baby Jesus.

I can see Tesla leaving space in the tractor for an larger battery pack, or a secondary auxiliary one.

I can not see trucking companies investing in non-standard trailers to use with BEV semi tractors. The whole point of using tractor-trailer rigs is that, with few exceptions, any tractor can pull any trailer. If you throw that out, the entire business model collapses.

I don’t see why this is so hard to understand. It’s pretty straightforward. Either a semi tractor can pull any semi trailer, or else it will be relegated to niche operations, which means few fleet operators would ever buy one.

That rather suggests that Tesla, and not the fleet owner, will be paying to provide electricity to the Megachargers, contrary to what I’ve been asserting.

I wonder what Tesla’s business model is here? With Tesla aiming at fleet sales, and fleets needing Megachargers positioned where it will best benefit them (and not the public at large), I was guessing Tesla’s business plan for the Megachargers would be like Tesla Destination Chargers, where the charger is owned by, and electricity provided by, the property owner.

But if Tesla is guaranteeing a fixed price for electricity, that indicates a different business plan.

Tesla can’t do anything about the shape of the trailer. Semi tractors have to haul standard trailers. If you demand they use specialized low-drag trailers, then you instantly eliminate most of the market for a semi tractor.

There are also add-on “boat tails” and “skirts” which could be attached to a standard trailer; from what I’ve read, that can improve energy efficiency by up to 15%. But again, that’s something trucking companies are not gonna want to mess with. The goal is just to hook the trailer up to the semi tractor and Go! Not to mess around with installing special tails and skirts on every trailer they haul, and then removing them at the destination. (And dealing with the logistics of making sure there were a set of tails and skirts for every trailer where and when needed, would be another hassle and expense no trucking company would lightly undertake.)

If Tesla can use sliding panels to dynamically shut off the gap between cab and trailer, that will be a true innovation, and certainly would provide a significant reduction in drag. But as I understand it, Tesla hasn’t yet demonstrated they can do so. I hope they can, but getting that to work reliably on a long-term basis, month after month and year after year, seems problematic to me. Let’s see Tesla demonstrate this in a truck that’s driving on a bumpy road and backing up a ramp to a loading dock.

And if I’ve mis-identified you as an anti-Tesla FUDster, then my apologies. When someone continues to post the same factually incorrect negative claims about Tesla and its cars even after the truth has been pointed out to them, they look like a FUDster.

As they say: If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and waddles like a duck, then it’s probably a duck. If you claim your comments are not FUD, despite consistently appearing to be so… well, perhaps you actually are a swan. But you sure look like a duck.

There’s plenty of room in the tractor, even for an auxiliary extended-range battery pack. No need to put a battery pack in the trailer, which would then require that trailer to be forever married to that one semi tractor.

The whole point of semi-tractor-trailer rigs is that the trailers are interchangeable. Batteries don’t go in the trailer!

The question is why anyone would ever want to put a battery pack in the trailer. There is plenty of room in the cab; why separate the pack from the tractor?

Aside from that, the economics simply don’t work for putting the battery pack in the trailer. Trucking companies keep about 5-7 trailers around for every tractor, and no fleet operator is gonna rent 5-7 battery packs from Tesla to power just one tractor!

No reason for additional batteries in the trailer. Current federal laws mandate half hour rest periods where the driver is off-duty or using a sleeper berth for at least 30 minutes.

The recharge time for 400 miles of range is 30 minutes. If they start the day with 500 miles of range, and charge for 30 minutes during their mandated down time, they have a total range of 900 miles in a day without adding a single additional second to their day waiting to charge.

“The recharge time for 400 miles of range is 30 minutes. If they start the day with 500 miles of range, and charge for 30 minutes during their mandated down time, they have a total range of 900 miles in a day without adding a single additional second to their day waiting to charge.”

And there we have the long-range BEV trucking business model! It’s astounding that Elon didn’t say that during the Reveal!

Of course, it’s not as flexible as the diesel semi tractor business model; it requires the truck driver to spend his lunch break sitting at a Megacharger.

That’s an excellent question, and one we are eager to see answered. If Tesla is guaranteeing a 7¢/kWh cost for charging, then that suggests to me that they will own and operate the Megachargers… contrary to what I had anticipated.

This is all brand new. We didn’t even have the “Megacharger” brand name yesterday.

The Teslarati article seems informative, altho I think most or all the useful data in that has already been reported in comments here.

The Electrek article… not so much. Lots of fluff, very little data. However, I give them kudos for lots of photos showing several things I had not seen other places. (I was unable to access the live event. I did try to follow Twitter feeds, but there wasn’t much useful info from that source.)

I have heard few truckers to laugh at the cost he had up there for regular truck in $/mile …. this might be some higher end number someone who plans to buy Tesla trucks gave them to play with.

Secondly … guaranteed 0.07$/kWh electricity price? … is it reasonable to assume that average US wholesale price is 0.05$/kWh …. so basically they make zero money on the “fuel” sell transaction to the trucker? Good for the truckers, not so good for them? Or do you think they can buy even cheaper than 5cents?

The price of power to industrial customers is generally close to the wholesale price of electricity. In 2016, the annual average price of electricity in the United States was 10.28¢ per kilowatthour (kWh).

I don’t see how Tesla can sell electricity for 7¢/kWh unless it’s a loss leader. Perhaps the average price of electricity in the regions where they anticipate selling the Tesla Semi Truck is lower than the national average?

Perhaps Tesla is planning on relying on a night-time price differential, and that most of the trucks will be recharging at night? That might be the answer, altho I don’t know how much difference there will be in a night-time differential for industrial customers, and at these power levels, Tesla is definitely going to need an industrial power hookup.

And please, nobody try to convince me that Tesla is going to lower electricity rates by using solar power farms. Even a single Supercharger stall would need a solar farm the size of one to two football field in size, to provide all the power! For a Megacharger stall?

Anyway, solar powered Megachargers are even more unrealistic than solar powered Superchargers. Fuggedaboutit!

@Pushmi-Pullyu said: “And please, nobody try to convince me that Tesla is going to lower electricity rates by using solar power farms…”
—————

Remote Net Metering:

“It allows renewable energy system owners with excess net metering credits to offset other electric accounts that are also in their name. The site or electric meter the solar system is connected to is called the Host Account, and the sites receiving the excess credits are the Satellite Accounts.”

Is Tesla going to build huge, extensive solar farms in multiple locations to offset the amount of electricity they are getting from the grid to power the Megachargers?

Well, let’s look at what Tesla has done with its Supercharger network, which Tesla originally touted as being solar powered. In the years since Tesla started building Superchargers, has it built any solar farms to offset the power? No, it’s merely put up a few solar roofs over a few Supercharger stations; roofs which if my “napkin math” is correct, provide at most 1-2% of the power those particular Supercharger stations use, and far less if you consider the Supercharger network as a whole.

I don’t find it reasonable to believe that Tesla will do any different for Megachargers. If the cost/benefit ratio isn’t sufficient for Tesla to power Superchargers that way, it certainly won’t be sufficient for the much higher power demand from Megachargers!

Sometime in not too distant future Tesla will start announcing these regional Tesla solar farms. It’s something Tesla has had planned to do for a long while and one of the reasons why the SolarCity acquisition was important to Musk… its part of the bigger picture… including transitioning commercial trucking to sustainable energy… which the naysayers said could not be done… well Tesla is doing it.

“Sometime in not too distant future Tesla will start announcing these regional Tesla solar farms. It’s something Tesla has had planned to do for a long while and one of the reasons why the SolarCity acquisition was important to Musk… its part of the bigger picture…”

“Tesla says its Semi has a drag coefficient better than that of the Bugatti Chiron”

Does Tesla think we are all stupid??? The Chiron produces a massive amount of downforce, just like a F1 car, downforce produces lots of drag. If an F1 car would be a cube it would actually produce less drag than they do now. Good aerodynamics is not the same as low drag. It depends on what you want to do with the car. Comparing a semi with a sportscar is simply stupid. As well the semis surface is much larger. Again and again Musk sells these wrong physics to its buyers. If i hate something than it is manipulating people, who do not know it better. Cant believe poeple still trust him.

Ben is correct, super cars have aerodynamic devices that generates huge down forces as to keep them on the roads while turning at high speed or simply preventing them from taking off on a straight line. Those devices generates lots of drag so that for example a Fiat 500 has a much better wind penetration performances than a F1 for example.

I spent some time Googling the question, still found no answer expressing downforce drag in terms of a fraction or percentage of total drag.

What I do see is lots of discussion of how much variance there is in the downforce to drag ratio provided by different modifications, and how F1 rules severely limit the amount of downforce that aerodynamics can provide. Those rules may drive up the amount of drag that is caused by downforce, but so far as I know there’s no reason the Bugatti Chiron or any other production car would be limited to using only aerodynamic modifications which produce a lot of drag in relation to downforce.

Common sense says that so far as is practical, high end sports car auto makers would chose to add downforce without adding much drag.

Again, if anyone can point to an authoritative (or heck, even apparently well-informed) source showing what percentage or fraction of total drag on a race car or high-end sports car is due to downforce, I would appreciate seeing it.

F1 is 0.7 to 1.1, depending on downforce settings (adjusted to suit each track).

As a recovering aero engineer, I remember the main determinant of a wing’s lift/drag ratio is the Aspect Ratio (AR). AR is the wing’s total width (tip to tip) divided by chord length (leading edge to trailing edge). Sailplanes have incredibly long, skinny wings with AR up to 50. Car wings are have low AR (2-4) and poor L/D ratios. Other downforce devices, such as rear diffusers, are even draggier than wings.

Race cars also use lots of airflow for cooling, another factor leading to poor Cd.

“Race cars also use lots of airflow for cooling, another factor leading to poor Cd.”

Yeah, that was one of the points I saw made when I was Googling the subject; that race cars need lots of air flowing thru the car for cooling, which limits how “slippery” their aerodynamics can be. That’s not directly related to downforce drag, though.

Yes. Only that claiming might not be the correct word, as this is the truth.

Today it is not possible to produce downforce without creating lots of drag. Downforce (of diffusors and spoilers) enhances sideways friction of your tires by putting more “weight” (force) on them, which enables you to go much much faster through slow (time consuming) curves and enhances stability and safety, but of course you loose some time and efficiency on straights. Most sportscars could drive upside-down on the ceiling of a tunnel at more than 100mph without falling down to get an impression. Cars with low drag coefficients are never good on curvy roads or racetracks. So Musk is comparing two things that can not be compared and he knows it. Nearly everything has better drag coefficients than true sportscars.

Its like saying: “I trained so hard, i am now able to run 100m faster than an professional sumo wrestler”.
This comparison is so stupid, every honest scientist or engineer would be ashamed of.

Okay, in the absence of any authoritative force telling us what fraction of an F1 race car’s total drag is due to downforce, let’s just apply a little basic science and common sense:

Downforce is trading off forward speed for negative lift, in the same way that an airplane’s wing trades off forward speed for positive lift.

And okay, looked at that way, it’s obvious that’s going to create a significant amount of drag… and that my assertion upstream that you can get a lot of downforce with “just a little” drag, is flat wrong.

If there is something about Musk is that anyone with a bit of knowledge knows as he is BSing people. You just demonstrated it with that silly drag comparison issue.
I found it out being an accountant and having to stand his BS by doing exactly the same thing but on financial aspects (boasting a 25% gross margin as being about the best in that industry but failing to mention that he choose to calculate “his” gross margin by including a fraction of the costs others do). I have little trust in that guy due to this, some say a industry leader needs to be ruthless to be good, I still romantically believe it is not necessary.

I’m not a “financial guy” so my understanding of such matters is limited, but if I understand what you’re saying, your viewpoint is that Tesla is being dishonest in its accounting because it’s using non-GAAP accounting techniques.

Well, others say that GAAP rules are not designed for companies like Tesla, which are experiencing rapid growth. So at best, “Another Euro…”, you appear to be presenting your opinion as fact. At worst… you’re simply wrong.

Here’s another viewpoint:

Last FY, Tesla spent ~$3B on property, plant and equipment (almost doubling it over the prior year), including $1.5B on construction in progress (none of which will be deprecated until the equipment/facility is put into service). If you are halfway savvy, you will want to understand that gap between gross margin and operating margin–is Tesla doing something useful with that money or are they pi$$ing it away? If you are a good little troll, you will cherry pick line items from the financial statements to make whatever point you want, but what you did is the equivalent of cucumber – walrus = purple.

— Omar Sultan, comment at InsideEVs, March 24, 2017

I think it’s clear that Omar knows much more about finances than I do, so I’ll defer to him on the subject.

Well yours truly IS an accountant and I can tell you that for Tesla to not be adhering to GAAP and getting away with it would be absolutely ridiculous to conceive of. They are a going concern. There is no reason for them to do that, and with so many wanting to take them down, there is no way they would get away with it.

@Ben said: “Tesla says its Semi has a drag coefficient better than that of the Bugatti Chiron”…”Does Tesla think we are all stupid??? The Chiron produces a massive amount of downforce, just like a F1 car, downforce produces lots of drag…”
——–

Sounds like you may not be familiar with the term “coefficient”; it’s an algebraic multiplier variable.

Also, regarding “downforce”, that is determined by the airfoil(S) design dynamics… in theory the Tesla Semi could be designed to have an upward-force that increases the faster the truck goes… to the point of being a flying Tesla Semi.

With this much battery, this platform would be a great start for an electric firetruck. Firefighters love acceleration and need it for emergency driving. Firetrucks typically have to drive very fast, but short responses and then must be able to sit on a scene applying power and running pumps for hours. This technology platform could totally do that, just not in a semi-tractor form factor. Just a conventional box-on-frame truck chassis.

Regen would save on brakes, which firetrucks eat through. Not having the very loud diesel engine operating on scene for hours would save a lot of hearing loss.

@ darth, added to not having to idle for long periods of time on scene in pump mode is the diesel emissions that will no longer be spewed into the faces of the firefighters. Diesel emissions are highly cancerous as evidenced by the high cancer rates in firefighters. And never mind the insanely loud noise while engines operate in pump mode. It will be an amazing day when fire engines go purely electric..

I think they are going to have to get a lot better at thermal management. Granted it’s fairly quick, but for how long? Going up a long grade say I70 from Denver to Eisenhower tunnel, that is a long time at high loads. Considering the current cars can only do a lap or two a Laguna seca prior to thermal protection kicking in I am skeptical.
I laugh when they race a model S against something else expensive. It’s only 1/4 mile, let’s see how they stack up over 5 laps at road America? I would guess the model S will be in limp mode due to thermal limits.

A Tesla Model S/X will overheat after a few/several minutes running at maximum speed, because the battery pack’s cooling system isn’t engineered to handle that kind of heat dump for long. From reports, something like 12 minutes is the maximum time before overheating forces the car into reduced power mode.

For a Tesla Semi Truck to experience a similar overload from waste heat, the truck would have to be similarly laboring under a load much heavier than its cooling system was engineered to handle. Do you think that would happen just from driving up the grade on whatever public road you’re talking about?

The Teslarati article says “The Semi can also traverse a 5% gradient at 65mph, compared to 45mph for diesel trucks.”

There may be places where the grade on a public highway would exceed the ability of a Tesla Semi Truck’s cooling system to handle, when pulling a fully loaded trailer, but my guess is that those places will be few and far between. But we’ll have to wait for real-world reports from actual fleet operators or truck drivers, and that won’t happen unless and until Tesla actually puts the truck into production. If that actually does happen, it won’t be for at least 2-3 years.

I once tried to research the answer to this question: What is the standard size of a diesel semi’s fuel tank(s)?

I found there is no standard size. I don’t know what the average is, but you’re certainly correct to say that some of those trucks can go more than 1000 miles without filling.

Elon’s comments certainly seem to suggest that there is a standard size for diesel semi fuel tanks, and that is simply wrong. As usual, when Elon is dishing out hype, it’s best to take it with more than a pinch of salt.

I think many people in correctly noting Tesla’s hype forget what the world would be like without Musk. He constantly raises the bar (and fails to meet it short term).

Do you naysayers think that ANY of the big car companies would be scheduling multiple EVs if Musk hadn’t credibly raised the bar? I’d bet not a single one. Nissan would be strolling along on a ten year horizon. The rest would be nowhere.

Let’s give credit for the amazing impact Tesla has had on a fossilized industry.

Uhm, you need to get a username that isn’t already in use! I think the semi could likely work out well but as usual their fiscal justification just isn’t right.

Existing trucks using similar aerodynamic features are already getting MPG in the double digits. So let’s just use 10MPG. At 60k miles a year that is 6,000 gallons and at the US average of $2.80/gallon that’s $16,800 a year for fuel costs yet the electric semi will somehow save you $14k a year which means the electricity costs you only $2,800 a year.

In reality even if we use the most optimistic 1kWh rating per mile that means you’ll be burning through 60,000 kWh a year or at the US average 12 cents $7,200 a year. Take it to the pessimistic side and it’s $14,400 a year. Realistically you’re likely to be somewhere in the middle although I suspect more on the higher side.

All of a sudden the payback isn’t as good. The thing is that fleet owners know this and they aren’t stupid. While it may make a nice info graphic if I were a fleet owner the outright lie would piss me off. I would much rather they list actual real world figures even if they aren’t as rosy as realistically there is a good payback on this, albeit a bit longer than they suggest. As a fleet owner I’d rather be told up front what to expect and not have to figure it out for myself.

This isn’t just Tesla that does this, hell it’s virtually all businesses. I remember a presentation that states it costs something like $15 to enter an invoice in to your ERP and that given my companies volume they could save us millions of dollars yet we somehow managed to do it with 5 people that earned nowhere near in total even 1 million dollars. In the end the product would save us $, just not the ridiculously inflated #’s they were stating it would. It’s just annoying that you can’t trust what people/companies say when it comes to pay back periods a lot of the time.

“Existing trucks using similar aerodynamic features are already getting MPG in the double digits. So let’s just use 10MPG.”

Fleet operators are going to be comparing Tesla’s claims to the average for their existing fleet, not comparing Tesla’s claims to some experimental high-MPG diesel semi that no commercial operator is using.

So let’s use the actual reported real-world average for newer diesel semis pulling a load down the highway, which is 6.5 MPG.

But I can certainly see why a serial Tesla hating FUDSter would want to use 10 MPG for diesel semi trucks!

holy crap. If Walmart’s test fleet plays out, and Walmart goes to all Tesla truck for their fleet, that is game set match. Other retailers will have to follow to stay competitive.

The battle for second place truck manufacturer will hing on who is the first current diesel truck company who adopts the Megacharger standard and joins Tesla to build out the Megacharger network and install Tesla Semi drivetrains in their trucks instead of buying their engines from Cummins or CAT, etc.

Unfortunately I think history will repeat and Tesla will end up being the only ones using Megachargers. We already have electric buses, how do they charge? We already seen traditional manufacturers not using Tesla Super Chargers, even though that would seem to make a lot of sense.
Now if Tesla was to package their drive train only, and let integrators install it into their own designs, that would be a game changer as well. The OP who suggested fire trucks could benefit by electric would be able to do that. Virtually every vehicle could be adapted if even just one OEM released their EV drive train as a module any one could use to integrate into their designs.

1. EV buses don’t all charge using the same system. Proterra has 500 kW bus chargers in use; those are configured with a blade which slides up and down on a pole, inserting itself into the top of the bus.

Tesla’s picture for charging its BEV Semi Truck shows a charging station that looks like a standard Supercharger, with a flexible charging cable. I can only guess Tesla is planning on some pretty high level voltage for charging, if they are gonna use a flexible cable instead of a sliding arm like Proterra’s setup.

I really hope these Tesla trucks clean up what it’s like to have a house along a freeway. Someone I knew had a house by a six lane wide freeway and the big rigs made the most noise and it always smelled like a gas station near by.

The engine noises from the big rigs was something you could hear a 1000 feet away from the highway.

Once again Tesla wows is with real products, production intent designs. No BS concepts that will never get made, no camouflage to obscure their design, just a few vehicles that they are actually taking reservations for and most likely, like Model 3, will see production basically the same as shown. Such a refreshing change from all the fluff and hocus pocus other manufacturers go through.

What Tesla showed Thursday nite was not a production intent prototype, even though it was apparently presented that way. As I predicted, it was just a concept truck, not a production ready prototype.

Note that Tesla is claiming to use sliding panels at the back of the tractor, to close off the gap between cab and trailer. Such a system of sliding panels is not present on the concept truck, and Tesla did not demonstrate that system in operation. Looks to me like that’s a “work in progress”, which may or may not appear if Tesla actually puts a BEV Semi Truck into production.

I just saw a segment on the CBS news that showed a Tesla semi turning — an actual video not CGI animation — and it showed a hinged panel on the side of the truck that swung out to allow the truck to turn.

So, not a series of sliding panels, but a single swinging panel on each side. I wonder what’s going on with the gap at the top? I don’t see any panel moving up there, altho of course there certainly could be one that can’t be seen from the ground.

Long-haul truckers can achieve significant fuel savings by drafting behind another large truck.

Why do you think that big-rig truckers often travel in closely spaced convoys? It’s not for the social interaction!

‘Cause we got a mighty convoy
Rockin’ through the night
Yeah, we got a mighty convoy
Ain’t she a beautiful sight
C’mon and join our Convoy
Ain’t nothin’ gonna get in our way
We gonna roll this truckin’ convoy
‘Cross the USA
Convoy…
Convoy…

Interesting to see Tesla take a page from Nikola’s playbook by promising cheap fuel from solar. The marginal cost of battery storage is quite high, and refueling so slow, that solar to hydrogen will win that game.

As I mentioned in the Pioneer 500 kw ccs jack article, I’m a bit disappointed that the Tesla Semi will have no ‘remote cooling’ for fast charging the battery.

The advantages of ‘remote cooling’ would be:

1). Smaller, cooler operation of charging cable.

2). No huge refrigeration ‘plant’ necessary in the cab since the ‘chilled water plant’ is back at the corral. The on-board cooler will only be required to be large enough to cool the battery while it is in use (discharging).

3). Instead of taking a large fraction of juice to provide the overhead to cool the quickly charged battery, 100% of the juice coming in through the electric cable can work toward charging it, since the ‘chilled water plant’ is back at the corral.